The Kaiser Family Foundation has a new tool that shows you how bad the House, Senate, and Obama health care proposals are for you personally.
You just plug in your income, age, whether you’re looking for insurance for an individual or a family of four, and whether your employer provides insurance. It shows you what the average premium is and what your tax-financed subsidy would be.
Even ignoring the higher insurance costs that would result from new taxes and fees, the results are pretty grim.
The first pass I made showed that I would not get a subsidy for the insurance I purchase on my own because the Locke Foundation offers insurance to its employee unless the insurance costs more than some percentage of income (9.8% in the Senate bill, 12% in the House bill, unspecified in the president’s proposal). This assumes that the Locke Foundation continues to see value in paying for insurance instead of the $750 to $2,000 penalty per employee if management chooses not to. But I’m ok with no subsidy. That would leave me no worse off, in the unlikely event my high-deductible plan continues to be available.
My family’s insurance policy will cost less than $4,000 this year, it now covers vision, and all of our health expenses through the HSA are tax deductible. In what Kaiser calls a “lower cost area,” it assumes the premium for a family like mine to be $7,393. Even after the subsidy, which I’ve already paid for through taxes, this policy would roughly cost between $5,500 (Obama) and $5,750 (House). So my plan likely disappears and I either end up on the Locke Foundation plan which I opted out of from the start or I end up purchasing a plan that costs nearly twice as much, though part of that cost is paid through taxes and the after-subsidy premium is still up to $2,000 more per year.
If insurance companies really are evil, as the president and others would have us believe, why does health reform give them money and more power to control my health. And that’s even assuming his new regulatory rate setters don’t become pawns of the insurance companies themselves.
I don’t have a lot of confidence that Republicans will rise to the occasion Thursday, but there is a lot more to offer patients than what the president and Congressional Democrats have done.
